Katherine McAuliffe

Principal Investigator

Katherine McAuliffe is an assistant professor of psychology at Boston College where she directs the Cooperation Lab and co-directs the Boston College Virtue Project. Her past work has focused on how children across societies acquire and enforce norms of cooperation, with a particular focus on children’s emerging understanding of fairness. More recently she has begun to study the psychology of virtue from a developmental and cross-cultural perspective, specifically investigating the mechanisms that promote honesty, fairness, forgiveness and trustworthiness in children and adults alike. She complements these lines of work with a comparative approach, examining how nonhuman animals solve cooperative dilemmas. She received a BSc in Marine Biology from Dalhousie University, an MPhil in Biological Anthropology from Cambridge University and a PhD in Human Evolutionary Biology from Harvard University.

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Shalini Gautam

Post - Doctoral Affiliate

Shalini received her Ph.D. in psychology from the University of Queensland, Australia, under the supervision of Professor Thomas Suddendorf. She is particularly interested in how children’s understanding of possibilities in the past, present and future may influence their moral judgements and behaviours. For example, can young children reflect on how things might have gone differently in the past? Are they able to imagine and prepare for the future? How, and in what way, do children make moral judgements if they cannot yet imagine such possibilities? What moral exemplars influence children’s virtuous behaviour? In her postdoc, and as part of the Virtue Team, she wants to explore such questions both in the U.S. and cross-culturally.

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Alexander Noyes

Post - Doctoral Researcher

Alexander received his PhD from Yale University in 2021. He is interested in concepts of social institutions. He studies how people use relations to social institutions as a basis for inductive generalization. For example, how we use the relationship between lawyers and the legal system, Jews and Judaism, and Black Americans and the healthcare system to infer "lawyers defend clients,” "Jews keep kosher,” and "Black Americans are undertreated for pain." Alexander shows that people see social institutions—such as courts, congregations, and sports teams—as structured wholes. For example, a court is a way of designing a system of rules to organize people into a functional unit. Alexander is interested in when and how this insight emerges during childhood.

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Jacob Glassman

Graduate Student

Jacob is a third-year Ph.D. student and a NSF GRFP fellow in the Cooperation Lab at Boston College. Jacob graduated from the University of Maryland where he earned degrees in psychology and philosophy and a minor in statistics. Jacob's research broadly explores how children and adults think about and engage in intergroup conflict resolution, and his current work investigates different constructive intergroup conflict resolution strategies like compromise and forgiveness. He is also interested in how intergroup conflict is transmitted intergenerationally and how perceptions of threat are associated with the development of intergroup attitudes and behavior. Jacob is passionate about harnessing research in the pursuit of resolving intergroup conflict and conducts research which has the potential to contribute to this goal.

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Abby McLaughlin

Graduate Student

Abby received her B.A. in Neuroscience from Columbia University and is now a fifth-year Ph.D. student in the Cooperation Lab. She is interested in the development of religious beliefs and the ways in which these beliefs affect children's social behavior. She is also interested in the motivations underlying punitive behavior and forgiveness.

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Sophie Riddick

graduate student

Sophie is a first-year Ph.D. student in the Cooperation Lab. She received her B.A. in Psychology from Providence College in December 2021 before working as lab coordinator for the Cooperation Lab for 2.5 years. Sophie is intrigued by children’s developing social cognition, particularly as it relates to their reasoning about resource transfers and wealth inequality. Specifically, she is interested in exploring whether children differentially value and engage with resources as a function of how those resources are acquired (e.g., through self-acquisition or inheritance), and whether children perceive certain types of resource transfers as more legitimate routes to inequality.

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Liz Bracht

lab coordinator

Liz received her B.A. in Psychology from Skidmore College. She joined the Cooperation Lab in September 2024.

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Mairead Gatcliffe

THESIS STUDENT

Student at Boston College. Lab member since Fall 2022.

Anastasia Prussakova

THESIS STUDENT

Student at Boston College. Lab member since Summer 2022.

Sabrina Rick

Thesis student

Student at Boston College. Lab member since Spring 2023.

Grace Wen

thesis student

Student at Boston College. Lab member since Spring 2023.

Shelby Colvin

Research Assistant

Student at Boston College. Lab member since Spring 2023.

Jack Dwyer

Research Assistant

Student at Boston College. Lab member since Fall 2022.

Victoria Fertig

Research Assistant

Student at Boston College. Lab member since Spring 2023.

Ashley Kim

Research Assistant

Student at Boston College. Lab member since Fall 2023.

Sarah Wiederman

Research Assistant

Student at Boston College. Lab member since Fall 2023.

Lab Alumni

Julia Marshall

Post - Doctoral Scholar

Julia was a post-doctoral researcher in the Cooperation Lab through June 2024. She is now an Assistant Professor at Brown University in the Department of Cognitive and Psychological Sciences, where she directs the Mind and Morality Lab. Her research aims to develop a better understanding of the psychological roots of human morality.

Richard Ahl

former Post - Doctoral Scholar

Rick was a post-doctoral researcher in the Cooperation Lab through May 2024. His current research is aimed at uncovering children’s intuitive economic theories about resource valuation and distribution, building off his prior finding that children view high-wealth people as likely to share with others. As part of the Virtue Project team at Boston College, he leads studies on how moral exemplars can promote fair and honest behavior in adolescents and adults. In collaboration with Dorsa Amir, he also studies cross-cultural and developmental variation in children’s virtuous behavior.

Paul Deutchman

former Graduate Student

Paul was a graduate student in the Cooperation Lab from August 2018 to May 2023. He is now a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Pennsylvania where he is conducting research with the Center for Social Norms and Behavioral Dynamics and teaching psychology capstone courses in the Philosophy, Politics, and Economics program.

Aaron Baker

Former Lab Coordinator

Aaron joined the Cooperation lab in September of 2020 after receiving his B.A. in Cognitive Science from UC Berkeley and worked as a lab manager until August 2022. He is interested in building models that better account for how agents incorporate social information as part of their cognitive mechanisms. He is now a graduate student at Yale University, studying social learning and computational modeling.

Hannah Bolotin

Former Lab Coordinator

Hannah was a lab manager for the Cooperation Lab. She is interested in how intergroup relations and biases influence cooperation and administration of punishment. She received a B.A. in psychology and education from Wesleyan University and was a part of the lab from June 2019 to December 2021.

Justin Martin

Former POST-DOCTORAL SCHOLAR

Justin was a post-doctoral researcher in our lab from November 2017 to June 2021. Justin's research focused on the ways in which humans regulate each others' behavior. In particular, his research focused on how humans use punishment to change others' behavior, and how this adaptive purpose has shaped the processes underlying punishment. He is now a Senior Associate Data Scientist at JPMorgan.

Laurent Pretot

Former POST-Doctoral researcher

Laurent was a SNSF post-doctoral researcher from September 2017 to August 2020. He is now a professor of experimental psychology at Pittsburg State University, Kansas, where he teaches various psychology courses and continues his research on decision-making in children and other animal species.

Melisa Kumar

Former graduate student

Melisa was a graduate student in our lab from January 2018 to December 2020. She now lives in Istanbul, Turkey and is an entrepreneur in the wellness sector.